Archive for the ‘poems’ Category
Tha stance toward Reality
Filed under: poems, The Brouillon | Tags: Charles Olson, metaphysics, poetry
Leave a comment A week back I shared an unpublished poem “Unreal, that is, to the real itself…” and in the week since by a kind of weird serendipity I’ve been engaged in a dialogue concerning evolutionary psychology, reductive physicalism, by extension materialism and transcendentalism, so on and so forth, all of which tie into the question of the Real and what can be known of it.
I’ve made my polemical stance in this regard known in an ironic manner in the poem 
“Get Real” (it is a poem after all; how can it not be ironic?) so in light of the past week’s ink spilled (what is the on-line, digital version of this expression?) on the matter, I share here the prefatory poem to my second trade edition, Ladonian Magnitudes ‘topos tropos typos” (a confession’. The opening words are Charles Olson’s.
“for nine years
“three words constantly
“forced me down
“or kept me
“in or possibly
“steadied me…
topos tropos typos” (a confession
there is a freedom to be learned
a tradition earned
every wave of particular
not men or women, some
generation, not a sapling
scored around the oak’s core
but decision
not to attend what’s passed
for the new, not to accept the world
as given), &
stopped my reflection
stepped
the light
red
antistrophe
more vivid
that night
than the rain
wet street
(“E’en thus along the gulf moves every flame,
“A sinner so enfolded close in each
“That none exhibits token of the thief
O
read
the archetext!
“…where lives the virtue of poetry…”
Filed under: poems | Tags: Charles Olson, Chris Banks, Grand Gnostic Central, Ladonian Magnitudes, Novalis, poetry, poetry criticism
Comments (2) Yesterday, Canada’s Chris Banks baldly posed the question to his Facebook friends “What is authentic poetry?”. I (mis)remembered, after my own initial contributions to winding or snarling the ensuing thread, I had written a poem that addressed at least “the virtue of all authentic thinking” (and I’m hardly the first to imagine or suggest that poetry can be a kind of thinking). I post that poem, below.
It was written at the same time as the poem that opens Ladonian Magnitudes, “topos tropos typos’ (a confession”, itself composed before even my first trade edition, Grand Gnostic Central. It’s title is a quotation from Charles Olson. Whether it is possessed of any qualities that might be construed as “authentic” I leave to the judgement of the reader. For my part, I cite again, as I did first in yesterday’s thread, Novalis, from his Fragments and Studies 1799-1800, #671: “Schwer schon ist zu entscheiden, doch einzig mögliche Entscheidung, ob etwas Poesie sei oder nicht”: It’s already difficult to decide, but it’s the only decision possible, whether something is poetry or not.
“Unreal, that is, to the real itself”
where lives the virtue of poetry
and all thinking free
of the tyranny of the real
in perceiving the real
flow, elementally
fluid, hence watery
form forms
breath
seen in Winter
as slippery
hard and cold
as ice to the head
cracked
as the sea, unfathomable
God as Melville says
pondering
from the masthead
a shriek above
the water
a shriek
above the water
the same
‘Thanks’, plural of ‘thank’
Filed under: poems | Tags: gratitude, haiku, poetry, Thanksgiving
Comments (3) 
In part because it’s American Thanksgiving and in part as preface to my launching a new chapbook this Sunday, I post here a sequence of faux haikus originally shared over a number of days on my Facebook author’s page in 2016 that each mark (or, more philosophically, “trace”) a moment or spot-in-time of gratitude.
Thanks
Walk to work over Park Mont
Royale: birdsong &
melt burble in stereo.
#
Ekphrastic “tiny heroes
hunting flying grass-
hair butts” from an ex-student.
Facebook messenger giggle
threads nearly daily
with ex-student writer friend.
#
Not my fault but likely got
a student expelled
& yet I still feel regret.
Is it the Waldmeister garb?
Everyone asks me
directions on the Mountain!
Suffocating poetry
festival panel:
Happy, two friends to sit with.
#
An invitation to watch
a friend’s family eat
chicken, vegetables for all.
“He thinks everything he says
is a pearl”—a brown
pearl, a soft brown oblong pearl.
[This gratitude haiku is
in breach of Facebook’s
Terms and Conditions of Use]
#
A session on the Holy
Mountain, the Living
Room, Eichendorff Anlage.
The Extending the Table
cookbook my sister
gave us years back used daily.
Everything for tomorrow’s
Basic Raw Vegan
Protein Overnight Oats on hand.
#
A damp, cool, April Monday
morning; walk signal
turns as I step to the curb;
green buds heart high on
pussy willow; chickadee
trio met on Mont
Royale for palmseed breakfast;
lithe black Lab mongrel
mindless joy hunting squirrel,
redpink tongue aflap;
retiree, I imagine,
crouches down before
March End Prill, camera balanced
to film the melt stream.
#
Feeding the Mountain
chickadees again this time
four & lower down.
Fritz Lang on meeting Goebbels
& high-tailing it
out of Germany on YouTube.
Realizing a friend’s “today’s good”
status updates are
his own gratitude haikus.
#
Rainer in Heidelberg e-
mails me RE: a fish
& crow for a new haiku.
I’m here! Chickadees call; in
among roots, under
a bench two tiny Chipping
Sparrows; standing still
roadside a Mallard I could
look in her black eye;
white underwing then bark grey
back of a Cooper’s
Hawk pair; trunks and branches arch
a hall for birdsong;
quack honk pair call overhead
two Canada Geese.
#
Haematite & red
jasper pendant stones gifted
from friends worn daily.
#
Overhead overheard a
sparrow hen’s sighing
invitation to her cock.
Searching for chickadees I
spot a hawk broad wings
spread glide in two slow circles.
The gratitude haiku I
could write every day
about my Bedrock of Love.
#
More to be grateful
for today than seventeen
syllables can say.
#
Kisses waking me
three times last night after three
days cities apart.
Discussing poems
& coming to understand
some matters are style.
#
One martini to
dissolve pedagogical
moronicity.
#
Sunday morning sun warms rain
wet pavement; German
summers rise to memory.
#
Sitting myself free
from an intoxicating
toxic old mentor.
Getting progressives
have fought so much against they
forget what they’re for.
That uncanny first
green of grass & full foliage;
May in Montreal.
#
Scholarly duties
discharged—time to write & read
& think—poetry!
Morning walk to school;
chance meeting with Adrian,
gentle bookseller.
#
Distant Keel scholar
friend reads my latest poems:
“More soon! Herzlich, d.”
Brunette shoulder-length
mop, fair-face toddler; behind-
soother grin, “Bonjour!”
#
Doktor Pfeiler asks to read
“Bochum” at the Ruhr
Uni Anniversary.
#
France outlaws food waste;
Neckar gulls rise & circle
Hölderlin’s tower.
[Dear friend, the pseudo
haiku means thanks for the news
& Celan’s poem!]
I read hash high mice
horny but too stoned to climb on
yawn then lick themselves.
#
Tropical muggy
Montreal summer monsoons
cooling afternoons.
#
Despite knowing better grave
nostalgia wins out;
music of my youth.
#
Day after I’m told
chemo’s on the horizon
Archer season six.
#
The chick says Feed me!
The cock says Fuck me! The hen
says Leave me alone!
Message with Georg
about how The Walking Dead
is a great Western.
Every day Petra’s
home not teaching I ambush
and stroke her soft skin.
#
The naturopath
asks if I was an athlete
in my younger days.
#
The inanities
of my fellow travellers
to Toronto end.
Cloudless skies warmer
than forecast; little Grey Goose;
yellow fields like home.
The wisdom of George
mindful of his feet; Uncle
Andrew’s belly breaths.
#
A baker’s dozen
sparrows flutter dust bath tubs
in reno dirtsand.
#
Three hot tropical
I imagine days; frozen
red grapes to snack on.
#
Rigpa, Amor, learning, Poesie: what more do I need in my life?
#
What I have to say to you friends needs more than a haiku’s syllables
#
Couchlock or sitting full lotus, meditation bench, or straightbacked chair
#
Empty the cache, re
boot, meditate, and get back
down to the real work
For the moment, a poem…
In No Man’s Land
Wise Kung Fu
Waited out
One whole moon
on ‘is lutestrings
What tunes could fill those twentyeight days a woman’s monthly round
Did he have a copy of the classic anthology at his fingers’ tips
Asleep fingers twitch dreamquick licks
from March End Prill
Six new poems up at Dispatches
Dispatches from the Poetry Wars has most generously posted six hitherto unknown poems of mine in their summer upload.
It’s a vast and provocative site, well worth the time.
Saint Patrick’s Day 2003
Filed under: poems | Tags: March End Prill, poetry, Saint Patrick's Day
Leave a comment Below is a poem from my 2011 volume March End Prill (BookThug) marking an intersection of the calendar’s circle and history’s line of singularities.
Saint Patrick’s Day 2003
libera agonalia nefastus publicus
I’d love to tell of sudden fish
late end of January Friday afternoon
New Square Fish Market New Square NY NY Luis
Luis Nivelo single handed lifts a flashing carp on the scale 20lb
Then out and down club up to club it for Sabbath gefilte
tzaruch shemirah hasof bah !
Diablo! 57-year-old Skver Hasid Zalmen Rosen
11 children “Luis, what?!” I heard that fish talk!
tzaruch shemirah Old Abraham
buried last week? Adonai? hasof bah
“account for yourself
“the end is near
“pray & study the Torah”
St Patrick’s: Shamrock Irish triple deities
long before Patrick’s Trinity; Roman festival
of Mars, an enormous phallus paraded
through the streets: green for sex festivals the fashion;
Middle Ages the day Noah boarded the Ark:
World Maritime Day.
…Saddam Hussein’s got 48 hours…
…the Day of Iraq’s Liberation is near…
…do not destroy oil wells…
…do not follow orders to use Weapons of Mass Destruction…
…“I was just following orders” no excuse…
…we are a peaceful people…
…not intimidated by thuggery or murder…
…new and undeniable realities…
…a policy of appeasement toward…
…plotters of chemical, biological, or nuclear terror…
…the just demands of the world…
…to overcome violence…
…the future we choose…
…& may God continue
to bless America
Thursday morning Kenneth Masterson out the front door for his paper
“five or six dead fish about 10 or 12 inches long out by th’edge of my yard”
in the street more some rush hour road kill more across
“don’t look like they’ve been hooked”
might be white bass no ponds or lakes near
“really bad storms I wonder if some twister didn’t just pickemup & dropem”
imagine being “jess a pohet”
in Baghdad; who gives a fugg
if you care little abt Saddam
& less abt Geawge Dablya,
jess wanna pen yr little
quirky sufi scrapings
in peace, pumpin yr 2 wives — thassall
ye kin afford– chewing yr majoun like:
you’ll be incinerated along with them
maddogs jess ’cause ya happen to be an Iraqi!!!
I believe it ain’t unright fr me to
feel some solidarity with benighted pohets
‘n’ artists cowering in bum shelters,
disfigured into faceless monsters a la
Saddam. I is dead certain
there are more than one confreres there
who write Je est un autre — only we
aren’t allowed to see them, knowem.
Is there such a thing as Iraqi samizdat
how to send ’em secret artists a sign?
Multiversic takes on 9/11
Filed under: poems | Tags: 9/11, Fanny Howe, Peter Dale Scott, Peterloo Massacre, poetics, poetry criticism
Leave a comment Despite its being the fifteenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks Sunday, I had decided to, here, pass over the event in silence. Then, The Griffin Trust website posted Fanny Howe’s “9/11”.
I was struck—as I often am—by the commentary accompanying the poem:
Is it virtually impossible to write about certain events that are too immense, too devastating, too charged on so many levels? To go into the specifics, one risks being maudlin, self-absorbed, short-sighted, too emotional. To try to broaden the discussion and perhaps recklessly try to scale something to the universal, one risks being too political, polarizing or simply missing the mark.
Howe’s poem, of course, avoids being too “self-absorbed” and “too political”—by “suggesting the heart of the event’s impact, is how it affects who and what we love.” I wonder what the commentator thinks of Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy or Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony or Holocaust.
By way of contrast and to broaden and concretize the discussion, let me offer these two poetic texts that both fail to escape the commentator’s extremes: “The Tao of 9/11” by Peter Dale Scott (that both goes “into specifics” and is “too political”) and one of my own, excerpted from a longer work, that, too, is “too specific,” composed, as it was, in real time.
Writing a poetry including history is no easy matter, and the question how far the “heart of the matter” escapes history’s particulars and the machinations of power no less demanding.
Get Real: a poem
Filed under: poems | Tags: Ahad Master, Deepak Chopra, epistemology, humour, ontology, philosophy, poetry
Comments (2) I recently got caught up in a brief on-line debate as to whether emotions, sensations, and other mental phenomena were “really only” neurological states or not, which, later, reminded me of the poem below that had come to me a little like a joke concerning the same topic-ish.
Get Real
A neurobiologist, a theoretical and a computational physicist, an anaesthesiologist, and Deepak Chopra walk into a lecture hall to discuss The Nature of Reality.
Better to have staged a dramatic recitation of Plato’s Sophist, the Tao te Ching, or The Divine Comedy; even better if nobody knew Greek, Chinese, or Italian.
Better to’ve performed Schubert’s last sonata in B flat or had Ahad Master improvise, had everyone enter an anechoic chamber to hear their blood circulate and nerves hum,
Gone to The National Gallery of Canada and gazed on Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire,
Had everyone guided through a sequence of novice yoga moves or instructed how just to sit and fix the wandering mind on the breath swelling their bellies,
Fast forty days and forty nights, take a heroic dose of Psilocybe Cubensis (with due care to set and setting), cry for a vision, or participate in a potlatch,
Consider the view of the proverbial fly on the wall, the air in the room.
“A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another”
Brainpickings just posted some passages from an essay on writers, books, and reading by Rebecca Solnit, from which comes this post’s title. Solnit’s remark echoes one in an untitled “soughknot” from Ladonian Magnitudes:
When the hand’s styled
at the alphabet as
eyes sense words there
here’s something new say
five thousand years ago
Not the mother tongue which
when we think it born
all time dreams
comes to completion
What’s bound cannot be carried like air
shelved in the library the dearest
books give spine to fingers and palm
by heart beat and hip get carried away
Call and response: community and collaboration
Filed under: poems | Tags: Bruce Rice, collaboration, poetry
Leave a comment When T. S. Eliot died, Ezra Pound famously and bitterly quipped: “Who is there to share a joke with?”
I’ve been in a similar funk for some time now. This sense of acute isolation was recently aggravated by a friend’s lauding the sense of collaborative community she felt working with her publisher. Ironically, this same publisher recently despaired over getting any interesting conversations going given the hermetic nature of most social circles that are too often made up of like-minded, nodding heads.
That’s why it’s heart-warming and somewhat heartening to escape this dilemma and collaborate by chance. Yesterday, Bruce Rice, a poet I knew when I resided in Saskatchewan, posted a picture of a chickadee feeding from his hand at a writer’s retreat where he’s staying. The picture reminded me of a little ditty from March End Prill, which I shared with him. My lines, in turn, prompted him to compose a pantoum and put the picture, my poem, and his together as a spontaneous, e-broadsheet, which I share here, thankful for the ephemeral community that enabled the collaboration (including the chickadee!).
Poeta Doctus 